In a well-regarded article that discusses The Importance of Being Earnest, “‘Effeminacy’ and ‘Femininity’: Sexual Politics in Wilde's Comedies” [Modern Drama 37.1 (1994): 34-52], Alan Sinfield argues (we looked at this passage in class),
Dandy effeminacy signalled class, far more than sexuality. The newly dominant middle class justified itself by claiming manly purity, purpose, and responsibility, and identified the leisure class, correspondingly, with effeminate idleness and immorality. In the face of this manoeuvre, there were two alternatives for the wealthy and those who sought to seem wealthy. One was to attempt to appear useful and good; the other was to repudiate middle-class authority by displaying conspicuous idleness, immorality, and effeminacy; in other words, by being a dandy. (38)
Sinfield is countering efforts to read homosexuality into Oscar Wilde’s plays, a tendency among literary scholars seeking to reconcile Wilde's writings to his disastrous affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, which led to Wilde’s incarceration for "gross indecency" (got to love the Victorians).
consider Jack and Algernon or Orsino and Antonio outside of sexual expression or social status, at least primarily. Of course, our discussions of The Importance of Being Earnest and Twelfth Night have shown that sexuality and class provide two productive avenues of analysis for those plays. However, those aren’t the only two routes to insight. For this assignment, I ask you to consider how Jack’s and Algernon’s Bunburying and Orsino’s and Antonio’s fast-formed connections to Cesario and Sebastian are motivated by loneliness.
This assignment is the product of some thoughts I had while listening to a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast. Psychologist Niobe Way’s work friendships between boys figures prominently in the episode, which itself connects loneliness among American men with norms of masculinity. As Way’s 2011 book, Deep Secrets: Boy’s Friendships and the Crisis of Connection [Harvard UP], notes,
When male friendships are discussed in scholarly or popular literature, they are often relegated to the superficial category of “buddies” and described as “loose collections that offer very little sharing or emotional support.” Male friends are framed as back-slapping pals more interested in playing, competing, and boasting about various types of conquests than in talking together or sharing the details of their inner lives. These relationships are, in essence, defined by their simplicity rather than by their complexity, emotional nuance, and depth. In our twenty- first-century American culture, in which vulnerable emotions and same-sex intimacy are perceived as girlish and gay, heterosexual boys are described as uninterested in having intimate male friendships, and the stereotype that boys are “only interested in one thing” is perpetuated. (3-4)
Your task is straightforward: show, based on the evidence in the play you choose, how what is true for contemporary American men was also true for either Victorian or early modern English men, too. Pick either Jack and Algernon or Orsino and Antonio and respond to the following: How do the characters composing either pair signal their desire or need for intimate same-sex friendships, even if they don't explicitly state that desire or need? (Think about how you can tell what someone wants even when they don't come out and say it.) Do their respective plays deny those relationships to them?